Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Symantec State of Spam and Phishing Report - April 2010

[prwire] A close observation of spam and phishing tactics in Asia Pacific this month revealed some interesting highlights:

* With no additional natural disasters to exploit after the tragic earthquakes in Haiti and in Chile, spammers instead focussed on seasonal events such as Easter to deliver spam messages * Symantec observed that spam is an economic indicator, with many spam topics adapting to current events such as the global economic crisis * There was a mass phishing attack on two major retail electronic payment brands, with phishers initiating an attack that made up 4.4 percent of all unique phishing websites in March * Symantec noted a number of phishing websites aimed at luring Indian job seekers in an attempt to steal their credentials, then spam genuine employers for financial gain * The sharp decline in spam containing .cn URLs continued during March and messages with .ru domains are continuing to increase dramatically * Overall, spam made up 89.34 percent of all messages in March, compared with 89.99 percent in February * A nine percent decrease was observed in non-English phishing sites from the previous month, due to a fall in the number of French and Italian phishing attacks.